It's perfectly fair.

You're the one who got to cherry pick the script to use as an example, so don't complain that I cherry picked the most ridiculous line of that code.

Python can generate a human readable help menu with much less trouble.

Tell me one thing about that script that's easier in bash than in Python.

Forking off sed? Python doesn't need to, it has string manipulation. Forking off bc? Python doesn't need to, it has arithmetic.

And why are you using sed regular expressions just to do arithmetic? Now you have two problems!

https://blog.codinghorror.com/regular-expressions-now-you-ha...

Again, look at the Linux kernel and userland source code and give me a ballpark estimate of how many instructions it requires to multiply a number by 100 by forking off bc or sed, instead of executing a single "mul" instruction.

And Python code doesn't require a page of comments to explain why it has to go to so much effort and work around so many pitfalls just to convert a couple of strings to decimal hours.

Why, Python even has named function parameters -- now THAT is TRULY "amazing".

And in the number of keystrokes it took you to write the following comments (and the number of trials and errors it took you to finally get it right), you could have imported a hell of a lot of powerful Python modules, and read a lot of the interactive built-in help documentation about their APIs.

Your time would be much better spent getting used to using Python rather than sed.

    to_decimal_hours () {
        local hours="${1}"
        local minutes="${2}"

        # [h: ] uses the "h", ":" or " " character as a split delimiter.
        #
        # If the first split argument ends with "m", then we're not dealing with
        # hours at all, only minutes, so now $1 becomes minutes and we divide by
        # 60 because you can't have more than 60 minutes in 1 hour.
        #
        # Otherwise, we have both hours ($1) and minutes ($2). The hours can be
        # taken as is, and like before the minutes get divided by 60.
        #
        # It's also important to send both the hours and minutes in without a
        # space as input, otherwise values like "30m" will end up being "30m "
        # which makes $1 no longer end with an "m" and it will incorrectly report
        # back 30.00 instead of 0.5.
        #
        # awk will automatically remove the "h" and "m" characters when it comes
        # time to do the addition.
        #
        # Yep, awk is amazing. I'm just getting used to using it!
        awk -F '[h: ]' '{ if ($1 ~ /m$/) printf("%.2f\n", ($1 / 60));
                else printf("%.2f\n", $1 + ($2 / 60)) }' <<< "${hours}${minutes}"
    }